


The Faint Light of Dawn

by exfatalist



Category: Marvel Adventures: Iron Man, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Cryogenics, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:38:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3128171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exfatalist/pseuds/exfatalist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America has seen too many friends die over the course of a long, drawn out war. When it finally draws to a close, early on in the 1950s, he agrees to be cryonically frozen until the world needs him again, hoping to find the peaceful rest he deserves after faithfully serving his country. But things never turn out quite the way anyone hopes.</p>
<p>Tony Stark, young son of failed industrialist Howard Stark, has been missing for two months and, fearing the worst, Captain America is awakened to join the search.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aikoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aikoss/gifts).



> This was written for the Captain America/Iron Man Holiday Exchange, for Aikoss. I hope you like it! :)
> 
> Also, eternal thanks to my very awesome (and very anonymous, for now) beta for all the help with this story.
> 
> There are some additional end note warnings that may contain spoilers for the story content itself. Please check these notes for additional information about the tags used. If you have any additional questions about the content of this story (or there's something I've forgotten to cover in the notes that I should, sorry!), please let me know. Thank you!

Director Fury cuts an imposing figure, swathed in a long, black coat and a mysterious air. He wears an eyepatch over his left eye and the beginnings of a feral grin on his lips, lounging back in his chair at the head of the conference table with all the hallmarks of a big cat stalking its prey.

Steve Rogers refuses to take that bait. They have been halted at a polite stalemate for several minutes now, during which Steve has refused to open the dossier Fury slid down the table toward him. He hasn’t even looked at the file name.

“I knew your predecessor,” Steve says evenly.

“Really,” Fury answers. There’s no surprise in his tone. “For how long?”

“Two hours, give or take.”

Fury barks out a laugh, short and sudden. “Must’ve been good friends, then. Drinking buddies.”

Steve knows he was being mocked, but he isn’t giving an inch. “He gave me a file like this, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t,” Fury counters.

“ - and I’m going to tell you the same thing now that I told him back then,” Steve continues, talking over the Director. “I don’t thaw for anything less than World War III.”

Fury smiles, showing teeth. “And how do you know this isn’t it?”

Steve glances left, slowly, then right. He takes his time looking back at Fury, raising one sarcastic eyebrow. “You really oughta have all hands on deck if it’s that serious, Director.”

Fury looks enraged for a brief second, then slaps the table with a huge guffawing laugh. “Cheese,” he snaps, “I like your boy, here. He’s got a real mouth on him, doesn’t he?”

Agent Coulson, who had been present in the laboratory when Steve was brought from his cryonic chamber, looks like he’s flushing around the collar where he stands just behind Fury. “Yes, sir,” Coulson agrees.

Fury leans forward, lacing his hands on the table in front of him. “Open the file,” he urges, nodding toward the dossier. “No strings attached. If you’re not interested, we’ll put you right back into deep freeze until your next round of maintenance. You have my word.”

After another few moments of politely staring each other down, Steve finally risks a glance at the dossier on the table before him and is surprised to find a familiar surname: _Stark_.

Against his better judgment, he flips the file open to look at the first page.

_Stark, Anthony Edward. Age: 21. Status: MIA._

“His last known location,” Steve says without looking up. “These coordinates would put him in ... Afghanistan.”

“It’s been under Soviet control for some time now,” Fury explains. “One of the many concessions my predecessor allowed to keep the nukes from launching.”

Steve wonders, with only a brief pang of guilt, if that was the mission he turned down from the previous director of SHIELD. Not that even Captain America could have stopped a full-scale invasion. “How long has he been missing?”

“Two months,” Coulson answers.

On the next page of the dossier, most of the information has been redacted. “Why was he there?” Steve wonders, sure that the information could be found under all the blackout marker.

Fury is silent for a moment, clearly considering whether or not _Captain America_ warrants special clearance for the information. Finally, he admits, “Stark is a consultant. He was at the Pakistan border, supervising the installation of some equipment at one of our sentry posts. There was a small ... misunderstanding above the parallel. When the dust settled, Stark was gone. Two days later, a ransom video surfaces.”

As if on cue, Agent Coulson turns on a monitor embedded into the wall behind Fury, which begins playing the ransom video in question. It’s difficult to watch, even for someone like Steve who liberated his fair share of the camps Hitler littered across Europe. Stark is just a kid, seems even more so with a bloodied burlap sack over his head and a mass of blood-soaked bandages wrapped across his chest. His skinny shoulders stick out oddly with the force of his hands being cuffed behind the back of the chair he’s sitting in and he’s already learned to flinch when several of the captors manhandle him into further submission to rip the sack off and reveal his identity.

On the video, Stark blinks at the bright lights shining down on him from above, eventually hanging his head with exhaustion. Meanwhile, a voice off-camera reads a list of demands, addressed to _Stark Industries_. The voice reads in imperfect English, heavily accented Russian tones.

“Isn’t the kidnapping and ransom of an American citizen some sort of treaty violation?” Steve demands, though he knows fully well that it is.

Fury smirks. “It would be, if the Soviets hadn’t publicly admonished the acts of a fringe rebel group operating independently and without government sanction within Afghanistan. Hell, they’re even lending us a helping hand looking for the kid.”

“I bet,” Steve grouses bitterly, closing up the dossier. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

They all have, given how quickly Agent Coulson turns off the screen.

“Do we have proof of life?” Steve wonders.

“No,” answers Fury. “And we don’t have proof of death, either. Stark was privy to just enough of our secrets that the top brass are starting to worry. And we’ve had a few too many pin-pricks since his kidnapping.”

Steve raises an eyebrow.

Agent Coulson steps in to explain: “If he’s being tortured for information, then he’s giving them just enough to stay alive without compromising anything of value. The concern at this point, Captain, is that he’ll crack. Soon.”

“He either needs extracted,” Fury says, “or nullified.”

 _Nullified_. That sure is a nice way of saying killed, Steve thinks.

“I don’t kill kids,” Steve asserts, putting his hand on top of the dossier with every intention of sliding it back across the table to Fury.

Fury smirks again. “I know. You’re the one person I genuinely believe could bring this kid _back_.”

Steve hesitates. One last glance down at the file weakens his resolve to refuse entirely. Fury could have probably sent a team in at any time these last two months and put a bullet between this kid’s eyes, if the Director actually wanted him ‘nullified.’ But Steve ... well, he could get the kid back alive.

He could rescue Anthony Stark.

 

\--

 

_"I build machines," Stark says with a wan smile, "not people."_

_He had been trying to crack the Erskine formula for months; Project Rebirth, rather than picking up where it had been left off during the height of the war against Germany, petered out during the tentative peace with the Soviets. Everyone knows the brass aren't getting their battalions of super soldiers anytime soon, but Arno Stark is the first to break the news to them._

_His idea, instead, is keeping Captain America, the United States' greatest asset in the war against the red menace, in a state of suspended animation, until such time as medical technology advances and Erskine's formula can be reverse engineered from a sample of Steve's blood. It is, he urges Steve, the perfect solution: the Soviets can't get their hands on him, not under lock and key in Camp Lehigh, and he gets that rest he's badly needed after so many years fighting for his country._

_"So, it's like falling asleep?" Steve asks, looking Stark's machine up and down. It isn't dissimilar from the VitaRay chamber._

_"Just like," Arno assures._

_As it turns out, he’s almost entirely wrong._

 

\--

 

By 0600, Steve finds himself seated in a personnel carrier, halfway over the Atlantic. It’s the first time he’s been out of the Camp Lehigh cryonics bunker since 1952.

He’s flanked on either side by agents decked out in desert camo tactical gear and feels uncomfortably plain dressed in the same. He understands the need for it; as Agent Coulson explained, all intelligence indicates the Soviets gave up the super soldier program aspirations during the space race and it wouldn’t do for them to be reminded of the United States’ greatest weapon now.  But he’s used to being on point, being the moving target that draws enemy fire. The only concession they made was to retrieve his shield from weapons storage, but it looks _ugly_ , its target stripes and star painted over in a matte brown to blend in better with his surroundings once they’re on the ground. It feels entirely foreign.

Across the carrier from him, Agent Coulson is still wearing an ill-fitting suit, seated next to a stoic man with a scar to rival Director Fury’s own running diagonally across his nose from forehead to cheek. Half an inch higher, Steve suspects, and he’d be sporting a not entirely fashionable patch over his right eye and be match set with his boss.

“This is codename Hawkeye,” Coulson introduces. “He’ll be covering your exit.”

Appropriate. Steve nods once and Hawkeye does the same.

He wonders if this is Fury’s nullification guy. It isn’t a charitable thought, but Hawkeye has a nasty scar and a fifty yard stare. And though Steve refused that portion of Fury’s mission parameters on moral grounds, he nonetheless feels a sense of camaraderie with the asset seated across from him. For the first time since he thawed in this century, it seems like someone might be able to understand the things that Steve has seen. Has done.

The rest of the trip is spent in silence.

They deploy at the sentry station from which Anthony Stark disappeared, on the Pakistan side of the border, and are greeted by a painfully young lieutenant. He introduces himself to Agent Coulson as Rhodes, says he was Mr. Stark’s army liaison while he was here and has been heading up the rescue effort, but the Soviets have not been cooperating in the joint search.

On his six, Hawkeye snorts softly and Steve feels the same bitter amusement.

“We’ll need to see all your intelligence reports on movement in the area,” Coulson instructs.

Lieutenant Rhodes hesitates. “Respectfully, I would like to be considered for any search and rescue mission SHIELD is conducting, sir. I’ve been leading our search here for eight weeks.”

“Noted,” Coulson counters without batting an eye. “The intelligence reports?”

Rhodes looks torn and Steve wonders if the lieutenant has his suspicions about SHIELD’s sudden interest in locating Stark. But Rhodes can’t withhold the information without being insubordinate, even if he’s worried about Stark being silenced before he can spill any more state secrets under duress.

“This way, sir,” Rhodes says, turning sharply on his heel and leading Agent Coulson to the command tent.

When they’re well out of earshot, Hawkeye wonders, “We taking the kid?”

Steve suspects he means Rhodes. He really is very young for a lieutenant. “Seems pretty torn up about the Stark situation. And I’m not a babysitter.”

Hawkeye snorts again. “I like you, Rogers.”

The feeling is mutual, but Steve doesn’t say it.

Within minutes, Coulson motions the squad into the command tent for their briefing; SHIELD’s intelligence, combined with the reports provided by Lieutenant Rhodes, has narrowed their search radius considerably. There’s a mountain range within the search radius that would provide significant cover for a ‘rogue’ terrorist group and they’ve been given permission by the Soviet government to search for Stark within that area.

“Not surprisingly,” Coulson says, “the Soviets would like this rogue terrorist cell apprehended. If we make contact, they have promised to send a unit to intercept, so they can take all suspects into custody.”

“Bullshit,” chimes Hawkeye.

“Indeed,” Coulson agrees. “This isn’t a smash and grab operation, agents. This is salt and burn protocol. No survivors. If Stark has leaked the barest hint of information, written on the smallest scrap of paper, hidden in the very back of one of these caves, we need to find it and destroy it. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir,” the team answers in unison.

All but Steve.

“We evac the kid, then we mop up?” Steve asks, for clarification’s sake.

Coulson nods. “Of course.”

“And the evac plan?”

“Lieutenant Rhodes will have a convoy standing by,” Coulson explains. “His team will evac Stark. After mop up, we’ll fall back to a secure location and wait for SHIELD evac. Understood?”

Steve mulls it over, then nods. “Yes, sir.”

After selecting members of Lieutenant Rhodes’ usual search team, to maintain their cover, the SHIELD special ops team folds in with the regular search convoy and heads across the border into Afghanistan. The landscape doesn’t change much on the other side, but the sentry towers and show of military force is distinctly foreign.

Rhodes plays nice with the Soviet border patrol, who make a show of lamenting that the Americans still have not found their missing ‘little boy,’ but it all feels designed to _chafe_. Especially when they indicate Agent Coulson, somewhat out of place in their sea of camo fatigues wearing a tac vest over his blue button-down shirt and tie, to be a ‘distraught father.’ Something about this rubs Hawkeye the wrong way in particular and it takes one of his fellow agents planting an elbow in his gut to keep his hands off the folded recurve at their feet.

Several hours past the point where paved roads turn into packed dirt, with Hawkeye still itching to put an arrow through someone’s eye, all hell breaks loose. On a distant mountaintop, one explosion sets off a series, until the air is thick with debris and black, billowing smoke.

“Clint!” Agent Coulson shouts, vaulting Hawkeye into action.

He’s on his feet instantly, leaning heavily against the rollbar stretched over the top of the convoy jeep, straining to see into the distance. He pauses, then checks his visual through small binoculars. “Yup,” Hawkeye says, “that’s our destination. You think they made us, sir? Blew it to hell before we could get there?”

“Sentry station’s on alert,” their comms agent notes, listening in on local chatter. “They have no idea what it is, either.”

“Got a UFO, sir,” Hawkeye says vaguely, watching through binoculars as something shoots up from the mountain, then arcs through the sky on a haphazard, unguided course. Steve can barely see it against the backdrop of a bright blue, cloudless sky. “Not a missile. Too big to be debris.”

Rhodes brings the jeep to an abrupt stop, crunching sand under the wheels. “Is it Stark?”

Hawkeye scoffs. “Can he fly?”

“You’d be surprised,” answers Rhodes, dryly.

“Well,” Hawkeye notes, following the object’s arc as it descends further and further toward the horizon, “he sure as hell can’t land.”

Coulson sets his jaw. “I’m going to have questions about that later, Lieutenant. Take your men and recover that object, whatever it is. We’re pressing on to our original destination: we still have a mission to conduct.”

Rhodes lets himself out of the driver’s seat, allowing Coulson to get behind the wheel of the convoy’s lead jeep. He takes up with the next jeep in the convoy, heading off of what’s left of the dirt road in the direction of the downed object.

“Sir,” Steve interjects, “my mission is asset recovery.” 

“We have no reason to believe that Stark was in that - ” 

“Looked like a suit of armor,” Hawkeye says helpfully, settling back down in his seat. “Or a trash can.” 

“ - _object_ ,” Coulson finishes. “Out last intel has him in this area, under heavy guard, injured and subject to torture. Sending Lieutenant Rhodes and his team out looking for a downed trash can is strategically advantageous to our mission objective, wouldn’t you agree?”

Steve can’t argue with that. He did say he wasn’t a babysitter. “Yes, sir.” 

“Then let’s move out, before the Soviets get there first.” Coulson hits the gas, spins out briefly in the sand, and gets them back on their way in no time. 

Somehow, they’re still the first on the scene. Their comm agent assures them that won’t last long. 

The encampment would have been cleverly hidden before the series of explosions alerted them to its location; tucked into a mountain valley and obscured from view from the south, desert camo stretched across to keep it hidden from satellite imaging. It’s obvious now, with all the black swathes of smoke and low-burning fires.

“Move out,” Coulson shouts, tossing bags of C4 and detonators to each agent as they unload from the back of the jeep. “You have your orders.”

No survivors, no information left behind. Salt and burn. It reminds Steve, bitterly, of the last days of the war and how desperate they were to hold the French line against the slow, crushing march of Stalin’s forces. They would have done anything. They did. 

Steve refuses his own bag of explosives, holding up a hand to decline. “I _do_ have my orders, Agent Coulson.”

Surprisingly, Coulson relents. “You have fifteen minutes, Cap. Make ’em count.” 

Inside the largest cavern is the remnants of a command center, with doors blown off their hinges and rockslides blocking passageways, dead bodies littering the cave floor. Steve picks his way through the mess, following the path of destruction until he finds an empty room behind a destroyed door that, until recently, was held in place with a three inch thick deadbolt. Given the surveillance equipment in every corner of the room and the filthy cot shoved along the back wall, he suspects he’s found the room where they had been keeping Stark, but Stark is nowhere to be found. 

But ... with the doors blown back from _inside_ the room, Steve suspects he won’t find Stark here - or anywhere else in the compound. Instead, bearing in mind the orders Coulson had reiterated to their team again and again, Steve turns his attention to the room itself. It’s a workshop, full of tools and scraps of metal cannibalized from old weapons. There are some scattered design papers, which Steve hastily stuffs into his pockets, but not much else. He wonders how Stark managed here, between bare minimum meals and no other facilities, between his wounds and torture for information. He’s just a kid. 

“Find anything?” an agent asks, picking her way through the ruined doorway. 

“This all needs to go,” Steve answers. “They had him working on something in here. Weapons, maybe.” 

The agent looks unconcerned, stepping further inside to set up a slab of C4. “Six is go,” she says over the comm. Agent Coulson’s command answers and she sets her timer on his mark, then turns to Steve. “That’s our cue, sir.”

The weight of the crumpled schematics in his pocket feels unbelievably heavy as he walks quickly with the agent to the mouth of the cave. They pick their way down the debris-strewn path to the waiting jeep and the entire team is back down at the valley entrance before the C4 detonations rumble in the distance. 

“Rhodes has Stark,” their comm agent announces. “Picked him up walking in the desert. No sign of the unidentified object we saw.” 

Something twists in Steve’s gut, some feeling of dissatisfaction he can’t place. They just destroyed every piece of evidence Stark was even held hostage here, _except_ for whatever mechanism he used for escape. “Shouldn’t we look for it?”

Coulson is silent for a long moment. “We’ll miss our rendezvous with evac. I don’t believe Director Fury would authorize an extended incursion behind enemy lines for an object whose value we have yet to determine. Do you?”

“No, sir,” Steve agrees. His thoughts drift to the schematics in his pocket, to the rough drawing of a suit of armor. Without the schematics, with only scrap pieces, could anyone really be able to put it back together and make it _work_? 

No one speaks again until they reach the extraction point; night falls and the desert temperatures plummet, until Steve has to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He knows it isn’t that cold, logically, but he’s been chilled to the core for decades. Maybe he’ll never fully thaw.

From the extraction point, they’re taken by stealth chopper across the border and back to the sentry post where they started that afternoon. Lieutenant Rhodes is waiting to greet them, just as before and thanks them for their assistance, what little they gave, in locating Stark. To Steve, it seems really more like confluence that they happened to be there when Stark decided to make his escape. And sheer, dumb luck that the Soviets aren’t going to raise a fuss about their installation of ‘rebels’ being destroyed. For a man of his experience, those are the two worst deciding factors in any military operation and they leave a strange sense of dissatisfaction in their wake.

“Tired?” Hawkeye asks, as they load back into the troop transport they arrived on to ready for the long flight back home.

Steve half-smiles. “Yeah,” he admits, “I think I’m due back at Camp Lehigh, now.”

Coulson closes the rear door and signals the pilot, before taking his seat and strapping in. “Negative, Cap. I just got word from Fury: you’re expected in Washington for debriefing.”

“Agent Coulson,” he says, patience wearing thin. He lets his head rest back against the seat behind him, “I haven’t spent this much time out of cryo in sixty years.”

“Might be time to start,” is all Coulson answers.

Steve takes a slow, measured breath and does his best not to think about how _right_ the man probably is.

 

\--

 

_The man's metal fist clangs against his shield with a dull thud, the force of the vibration shaking Steve to the core. Before he can think, a knife slips up beneath his defenses and he can only react, jumping back and swinging wide with his shield. It's a glancing blow; in the space of a breath, the masked man springs forward again, swinging his knife in a downward arc toward Steve's chest. He blocks and they grapple in close quarters, feet slipping in the mud and senses disoriented by the sound of the fight closing in around them. It's the last push against the Soviets at the French border, the last stand before the Allies must finally admit defeat._

_In the close quarters fight, Steve loses his grip on the leather strap of his shield, distantly hears it splatter mud as it falls to the ground, and thinks, frantically, that he might have met his match with the Winter Soldier._

_A shot rings out and the Soldier's head snaps to one side; he staggers back from the brink of a killing blow. Steve strains to look and sees her, across the littered battlefield, bloodied and harassed, disheveled hair framing her flushed face. Yet Peggy's arm is stiff, her aim steady, the pistol unwavering in her grip. "Steve!"_

_But the bullet has only caught the Soldier's mask. He rips it off and discards it with a sharp snarl, his formerly obscured face suddenly, alarmingly, familiar._

_"Bucky!?" Steve shouts, drawing up short in the face of the Soldier's attack prowl._

_He pulls another knife from behind his back and throws it; Steve jumps, automatically, but never feels the knife hit. It wasn't meant for him._

_"Who the hell's Bucky?"_

_Across the littered battlefield, Peggy's knees hit the muddy ground. The knife found its mark, buried to the hilt in her stomach. She gets two more shots off, burying a bullet in the Soldier's shoulder, then another in his chest, but Steve refuses to finish the job. He lets the Soldier make a retreat, so he can rush to Peggy's side and cradle her in his arms as the light leaves her eyes._

 

\--

 

Steve waits in the lobby of the Triskelion, feeling underdressed in civilian attire and unprotected after relinquishing his shield back into weapons storage, those crumpled schematic papers still heavy in his pocket, and stares at the aptly named _Wall of Valor_ displayed prominently across from the lobby entrance. It seems to mark the deaths of notable SHIELD agents, even from the time during which they fell under the SSR banner, and he finds himself, morbidly, picking out all the names he recognizes.

He finds Peggy’s name first, automatically, his eyes drawn sharply to her. _Margaret “Peggy” Carter, 1951._ It was just last year, the twisting ache in his heart seems to tell him, but the towering architecture of Washington, D.C. screams otherwise. She would be an old lady now, if she had made it out of the war, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren to gather around her bedside when old age finally took her peacefully in her sleep, the quiet punctuation at the end of a long, full life.

Dugan is just above her on the wall - _Timothy “Dum Dum” Dugan, 1951 -_ and Steve can still hear the watery way he had laughed in his final moments, trying to hold in his guts until the medic arrived. Dugan had a letter in his breast pocket, soaked through by the time they found it, written in pencil and illegible against all that blood. Steve still wonders who it was from or who it was meant for, just another piece of one man’s life unraveled by the horrors of war. The letter never arrived, or was left unanswered until it was forgotten, and had ceased to mean a thing for decades now, except where it’s locked away in Steve’s memories, kept fresh and raw to gnaw at him.

There are more names, more than he wants to recognize, leading on down through all the years of the organization. Scientists who worked on Project Rebirth, Directors he met during cryonic chamber maintenance. Steve finds Arno, abruptly, and realizes that he died back in ’88 with a strange sense of relief. Arno lived the life Steve had imagined for Peggy, having a family and growing old surrounded by loved ones.

Nowhere on the wall does he find _James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, 1945_. Steve isn’t sure if he was really expecting to find him.

“There’s one in every SHIELD facility,” Agent Coulson announces, having at some point come to stand just behind Steve’s left shoulder.

Steve hates that he startles easy and hasn’t had the chance to shake it since coming home from the front. He’d figured, perhaps unwisely, that sleeping for sixty years would cure him of all those odd little ticks picked up during the war.

If Agent Coulson notices, he’s polite enough not to mention it and instead offers Steve a laminated badge, emblazoned with SHIELD’s logo and _VISITOR CLEARANCE_.

“Director Fury is waiting, Captain.”

With that, Steve follows Agent Coulson to the elevator and, with some bemusement, watches through the clear glass wall as they rise up and up and up to the floor housing the Director’s office.

The meeting is abrupt and to the point, just the way they both like, and after the paperwork is signed off on, Director Fury asks if he wants to go back into the cooler. To wait for World War III, he adds with a touch of sarcasm.

When it seems like Steve needs a minute to mull it over, Fury talks about the supposed ‘Cold War’ and how the world has done nothing but cower in fear since the Soviets plowed through Berlin, dragged Hitler into the streets for public execution, and kept marching straight across Europe, becoming the new face of fear. Some tacticians, he says, blame the Allied losses at Normandy for crippling their war effort, softening their strategy, and giving the Soviets the upper hand on the push toward Germany. If the Allies had been stronger, more united, maybe the world wouldn’t be sitting on ration-stocked bunkers waiting for someone’s hand to fall off the nuclear dead man’s switch. Arno Stark put him on ice because he couldn’t crack Erskine’s formula, Fury goes on, but they have a lot more at stake now, today, than whether or not the Soviets will figure out the super soldier serum first - and a lot more to _fear_.

“I don’t need another relic collecting dust in the basement,” Fury says. “I need another man on my team I can trust when it comes down to the wire.”

Steve, being a fan of stirring speeches himself, doesn’t have the heart to tell Fury that the sunlight streaming through his office window alone had already helped him make up his mind about returning to the cryonic chamber.

“I’ll stay,” Steve answers.

 

\--

 

_They thaw him ever so often, to maintain and update the cryonic chamber (and, Steve suspects, to maintain and update him, as well). By the third or fourth time, Steve is almost used to it._

_He wakes up in a hospital bed, heaped with blankets, and finds Arno sitting in a chair at his bedside. Just like yesterday and the day before, he thinks, except that was five years ago, ten years ago. He's lost count, now. Arno looks a little older, the gray hair suits him._

_"No physical stress from the process," Arno announces, just as Steve echoes the words in his head. Arno always starts with the same thing, the familiarity of it is a comfort to Steve. "You're as healthy as the day we put you in."_

_"I think that was last week," Steve jokes and finds his voice rough with disuse._

_Arno, bless him, laughs at Steve's joke like it's the first time he's heard it. "How are you feeling?"_

_"Cold," he admits. "Tired."_

_Arno has asked him a couple of times, now, but Steve has never had the heart to answer truthfully: being put under, being cryonically frozen, is not at all like falling asleep. Waking up with no recollection of the time that passed while his eyes were closed, yes, that's a little like falling asleep, but in the way that apples are a little like oranges._

_He feels close to admitting it, this time, but the door suddenly flies open and a young boy rushes into the room at breakneck speed to throw his arms around Arno. "Dad! You said I could meet him!"_

_Arno laughs. "I did, didn't I?" He patiently urges the boy to let go so he can stand, then puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders to turn him to face Steve’s bed. "Howie, this is Captain America," he introduces. "Steve, I'd like you to meet my son, Howard."_

_Steve smiles, despite the new information making his head spin. Arno? A father? "Nice to meet you, Howard," he says, offering the young boy his hand to shake._

_Howard, suddenly very serious, takes Steve's hand and shakes it with enthusiasm. "It's an honor, sir."_

_Steve laughs while Arno beams proudly. "Come along, Howie. Captain Rogers needs to rest now. Say goodbye."_

_As Arno steers him toward the door, the boy waves. "Bye, Cap!"_

_"Bye, Howard. See you again soon."_

 

\--

 

Brooklyn both is and isn’t exactly the way Steve left it. It’s noisier, at all hours of the night, and the traffic is worse than ever, but beyond the neon signs and highway robbery cab fare, it’s the same mixture of vibrant and awful that he remembers from his youth. He still expects to trip over ticker tape in the streets from V-E Day - they’d still been cleaning it up when he shipped off to Camp Lehigh that last time - and it takes him longer than he’d like to grow accustomed to the idea that that time has long since passed.

Training to get clearance for field work with SHIELD is necessary, but ultimately not difficult; he passes everything with flying colors, except the psych eval. That’s something new. No one ever asked him how he felt about his mother or to say the first word that popped into his head before they gave him a gun and told him to kill some Nazis for his country. He doesn’t know what qualifies as a red flag to a doctor poking around in his head, but Fury says there was more than just one and that he’ll have to settle for status as a consultant, rather than a full-fledged field agent. At least until they get his head squared away.

“You understand,” Fury says, like it isn’t even a question. Like Steve _should_ and _does_ know what’s wrong with the space between his ears.

“Yes, sir,” he lies effortlessly.

Steve doesn’t have the first clue what’s wrong. Is anything wrong? The world, maybe. Paying five bucks for a loaf of bread while there’s a heaping display of bananas the next aisle over, some of them ignored and rotting, that seems pretty wrong to him. Blurred out pictures of movie stars without their clothes on gracing the fronts of magazines, that seems pretty wrong, too. He starts to wonder if anyone as young as those SHIELD head doctors, too young to know a goddamn thing about war, can make a judgment call like that, can summarize the whole of a man’s life based on what he sees in blobs of ink and how he responds to words that feel like the business end of a gun shaking against his temple, a nervous finger on the trigger just waiting to startle.

 _Winter_ , they ask him.

 _Hell_ , is what he answers. He doesn’t know why, it just comes out. Maybe he feels like hell has frozen over for them to be sitting here, in a whole other century, poking around in his head to see if he’s lost his marbles.

 _And this one, Captain,_ they say calmly, holding up a blob of ink that looks just like the kid who hastily laid himself over a Soviet grenade to save his unit. They say it like they don’t know, like they have no idea they snuck something horrible into the deck of cards, casual and innocent and with a soft, encouraging smile.

What does he tell them? How does he make them see that what they’re asking is all wrong? They use his first name, they call him back to the small, white room and their encouraging smiles, then ask him again about the ink. About the kid. About all that blood and that horrible, sick relief a guy feels when he’s alive because his buddy’s dead. It feels worse for him, knowing if he had gotten there in time, if he had only moved faster ...

 _Akron_ , he answers and his voice feels dead, feels like it’s fifty miles off and not even his own anymore. That’s where the kid was from. The fellas teased him, called him that, and that’s what he sees. Steve wonders what they told his mother.

So, they withhold his clearance and it seems like he’s the only one who’s surprised about it. Rather than getting back out there and doing something useful, rather than being a trusted guy on Fury’s team during a fearful time, Steve travels between a SHIELD sanctioned apartment in Brooklyn to one of their training facilities in Manhattan every day to knock around a punching bag. It feels hollow. Everything does, when he doesn’t have a purpose.

He doesn’t fail to notice that Stark is on every TV in every shop window that he passes by on his commute. _Stark Industries No More?_ the blotter reads, or _Stark Serious About Reform_ , depending on the news network’s partisan leanings.

The TVs in the training center’s gym, too, are all set to different news channels (Steve discovers there’s a few) and all of them seem to be covering Stark’s recovery from captivity and some sort of change in heart where his company is concerned. Steve gets the story in pieces, doesn’t consciously follow it, but finds himself hearing Howard in Anthony’s voice and seeing him in his sweeping, salesman gestures. It’s the expressions between his cue cards, or when he goes off cue entirely, where he looks like Arno, something uncertain in the way he glances down or excited in how he pitches new technology, new ideas.

Steve isn’t entirely aware of how much he’s been paying attention to the news until Hawkeye - Clint, he says to call him - starts joining him at the gym. He changes the channel from the news to a game show with a big, spinning wheel where people guess the prices of household brands only half of which Steve even recognizes. At first, Steve hates it, but the longer it goes on in the background, the more he focuses on his workout, tuning out everything but the thump of his gloves against the bag.

“I can tell you how to get past the shrinks,” Clint offers. He’s been holding the bag for Steve during his workout for going on a week, now, and this might be the first thing he’s said that whole time. “Everyone knows what to say to get a pass.”

Everyone but him, Steve thinks.

“Yeah?” he asks.

Clint grunts when a particularly hard left hook rocks the bag. It seems to double as confirmation.

“They want me to talk to a doctor about it,” Steve admits. He’s had the card on his desk back at the apartment for a while, sitting in the drawer next to the papers he lifted from that cave back in Afghanistan. He’s been steadily ignoring one of those two things for a while.

Clint scoffs. “Always will,” he answers. “What’s a doctor gonna do? Make you feel better about all the blood on your hands?”

Steve has to admit that Clint seems to have a point, there. “You ever go?”

“Once,” Clint answers, gritting his teeth and leaning his shoulder into holding the bag as Steve’s punches grow in energy and violence.

For a moment, Steve wonders what it was that drove Clint to the edge to need a psych eval in the first place. Was it standard procedure for all agents, or did it link back to that glimpse of a short temper he saw in Afghanistan? He wonders, shamefully, if the doctors ask Clint word associations like ‘father,’ if his blobs of ink look like something worse than Steve’s own, something closer to home.

One final blow to the bag punches a groan out of Clint and he takes a step back, looking winded, but not upset. After a slow build to it, Clint grins. “Hit the showers and we’ll practice your answers, Captain America.”

It isn’t the first time Steve Rogers has lied to get out there and fight the good fight.

 

\--

 

_"How are you feeling?" Arno asks._

_He looks older, grayer, tired and frayed around the edges. That's how Steve knows it's been longer since the last time he was thawed. They must have upgraded the cryonic chamber, maybe it doesn't need as much maintenance these days. What year is it?_

_"Cold," Steve says and Arno is already writing on his chart. "Tired."_

_"You're not resting very well in the chamber."_

_There's a sick sort of relief to it, not being the one to finally break the cycle of dishonesty. "I guess not," Steve agrees. "It's not a lot like falling asleep, Arno."_

_Arno nods, sympathetically. "I got the feeling. Howard has some very interesting ideas about how we can fix that, Steve. Do you know anything about subliminal stimuli?"_

_Steve shakes his head, still a little caught on the idea of Arno's kid having ideas about Project Rebirth. What year is it?_

_"Subliminal means below the threshold for conscious perception. We'll be implementing some means of subliminal stimuli to your cryonic chamber; this should, according to our research, help you achieve a more restful state while suspended. How does that sound?"_

_He doesn't understand whatever language Arno is speaking, but does desperately want to wake at some point in the future and not feel utterly exhausted, like he's just been awake and unaware for the entirety of the time he's been under. "That sounds fine," Steve answers._

_"Good," answers Arno. "I'll let you get some rest, then." He gives Steve's shoulder a squeeze before heading for the door._

_What year is it?_

 

\--

 

No one questions how he manages to pass another psych eval a few weeks after failing the first, chalking it up instead to the difficulties of suddenly being out of cryonic stasis for an extended period of time. Except Director Fury, Steve suspects. He gives off a satisfied attitude, as if Steve has finally gotten around to doing something he was supposed to have done from the beginning. No one told him he wasn’t supposed to honest when the doctors started rooting around in his head.

But there isn’t much of a good fight. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of training, but not much else. At least not much that’s worthy of Captain America’s area of expertise, no matter how many times he protests that half of his exploits during the war were made up for comic books and to sell war bonds. Fury wants him on something big, though. Something important.

That is, until the story leaks. _CAPTAIN AMERICA RETURNS_ , reads the headline, above a picture from his old military personnel file and a candid shot of him on a Manhattan street in a ballcap, trying to look inconspicuous.

Clint reads the whole article aloud, ahead of a meeting Fury called with them and their shared handler, Agent Coulson. It’s a compelling cover story, even if Clint insists on reading it in a dramatic voice, but most of it is completely fabricated.

"Seen entering a vintage-facade gymnasium," Clint reads, crowing with laughter. He either hasn't noticed Fury has entered the conference room, or doesn't care. "Yeah, right! SHIELD just bought the oldest boxing gym in Manhattan and never updated it."

"Enough," Fury barks, prompting Clint to fold the newspaper back over with a smirk, but not inspiring him to get his feet off the conference table.

"Sir," addresses Steve, "what should we do about this?"

"We already have a story in place to cover this," the Director assures. "For now, I need you two on assignment."

The dossier Fury drops in front of him is, much to his surprise, the same one he dropped in front of Steve in the conference room at Camp Lehigh: _Stark, Anthony Edward_. "What now, sir?" Steve asks, looking up at Fury curiously.

"Agent Coulson has been unable to secure a debriefing with Mr. Stark," Fury explains. Behind him, Coulson's jaw tightens with what Steve has learned to read as annoyance. "It seems, leading up to the Stark Industries Board of Directors vote ousting him, he's stopped taking calls and hasn't left his Malibu home for several days. I need you to bring him in, so we can ascertain his current physical and mental status, as well as what state secrets he may have given up to the Soviets."

"It is weird," Clint agrees, finally taking his feet off the table to reach out and slide the dossier away from Steve to read it, himself. "Coming back from being held captive and canceling all his company's weapons contracts. You think he's compromised, sir?"

Fury isn't quite as unreadable as people seem to pretend; Steve knows the twitch at the corner of his mouth is an amused smile. "You tell me," Fury says. "You have twenty-four hours."

 

\--

 

_Awareness seeps back into the darkness of his mind, graying the edges of consciousness._

_Everything is fuzzy, viewed through a too-thick lens in the dim light of pre-dawn._

_He's cold. Colder than he's ever been._

_It hurts._

_His chest can neither rise nor fall, not enough to take a full breath, as if the cold is settled on him like a weight. His limbs are paralyzed, prickling with the faint afterimage of sensation, like blinking hard after looking too long at a lamp. His neck is stiff, he can't move._

_Slowly, fear begins to settle into the corners of his thoughts. His chest tightens with it impossibly further and then, just below the threshold of his hearing, there's something. A soft swish, a whisper he can't discern. It's there, just beyond him in the not quite darkness. Soft scales dragging on concrete, a cold hand sliding down stiff fabric, his name sobbed faintly. It's all, maddeningly, just out of his field of vision._

_He opens his mouth to speak, but his voice dies in his throat. As the seconds drag into minutes and the minutes drag into what feels like eternity, the question he wants to ask turns into a cry, into a scream, into the barely discernible sound of air leaving his lungs and nothing else._

_Something snaps._

_The scream rips from his throat with a ferocious force, but the cold, oppressive weight on his chest is nothing more than a warm blanket and the dimness if only a shaded bulb nearby. The whispers are gone, as if they never were, and he's breathing hard, breathing like he can't get enough oxygen. Everything around him is so still, so normal, that Steve suddenly doubts whether he screamed at all._

_He's in the hospital suite at Camp Lehigh; the room is different, but the layout is the same. The walls have been painted, the equipment replaced, but it must be the room. It's always this room. Where else could he possibly be?_

_The door opens and Steve, for one heart-stopping moment, is relieved to know that Arno is here. But the man who lets himself into the room isn't Arno. He's tall, dressed in a tailored suit instead of a lab coat, and has no paperwork, no medical chart, with him. When he smiles, it doesn't quite reach his eyes, and Steve still isn't sure if his scream was real or imagined._

_"Good morning, Cap," the man greets. "Remember me?"_

_His hair is dark, mustache neat and trimmed, but it still takes Steve a moment to see the resemblance. "Howard?"_

_"That's right," he says. "How are you feeling?"_

_Steve struggles with this information, struggles with the knowledge that Howard is this grown. That Arno is not here. How long has it been?_

_Howard waits patiently, then a little awkwardly, putting both hands in his trouser pockets while he waits for Steve's answer._

_"Cold," Steve says, vaguely. Then, after a beat, "Tired."_

 

\--

 

It isn’t exactly the way Steve imagines meeting Anthony Stark, not after their last information on the young man was that he was refusing calls and hadn’t left his home in days. Yet, within hours of landing and setting up in a SHIELD safehouse, they received word that Stark had just arrived at a _Stark Industries_ charity gala.

So, here he is, itching in the lax tailoring of a rented tux, surrounded by the reporters he had been steadfastly _ignoring_ since the story about him broke. He feels out of place and out of his depth unlike any other part of this new century thus far.

Still, when the comm in his ear gives him the signal, he steps up and pushes himself forward, into the crowd that has eagerly flocked around his target.

“Mr. Stark,” Steve greets.

Stark looks over at him, an unconcerned glance at first, but double-takes and eventually turns his full attention to Steve, offering a hand. “Captain.”

The small crowd Stark’s drawn to him, like moths to a flame, pulls back an inch with the collective breath it takes. Even out of uniform, it doesn’t take a billionaire genius to spot the face that’s been plastered all over the news and put it together with the rank.

Steve takes the hand Stark offers and shakes it firmly. "I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time," he says, rather than asks, turning up his _war hero charm_ to a million watts.

Stark looks, at least for a moment, surprised by the statement. But it only takes him a moment more to recover, laughing off the request with flippant ease. "Sorry to disappoint, Captain," he answers, relinquishing Steve’s hand and grabbing that of a nearby blonde woman, seemingly at random. "I've promised Angela, here, a dance."

The pair brush past Steve as the crowd parts around them and the blonde laughs all the way to the dance floor, but Steve still overhears her correct Stark that her name is _Andrea_.

Steve finds himself alone in the crowd that had been vying for Stark's attention, cut and thrown to the sharks. By the time he's managed to untangle himself from the imploring questions and unnecessary schmoozing of the social climbers, Steve has realized what a monumentally bad idea this is. Even if Stark is booked solid through the end of the year, even if there is no clear-cut standard channel through which to talk in a professional capacity, putting on a monkey suit and strolling into a charity gala should not have been in the top five alternate methods of obtaining facetime.

But Steve Rogers is nothing if not persistent.

After his first rookie mistake, Steve loses Stark on the crowded dance floor. A few minutes of fruitless searching and trying not to rubberneck only turns up the blonde, Andrea, alone and looking giddy in the wake of her dance with the man of the hour.

It takes a little while, granted, and a lot of skirting past party-goers trying to get his attention now (really, they’re like sharks), but Steve manages to catch Stark unawares again, this time near the bar. He muscles his way into the crowd and takes up space at Stark's elbow while the younger man orders a drink ... almost like he's reciting a movie line. Steve suspects he has no idea what he’s ordered.

"Got another dance partner lined up?" Steve wonders, trying for nonchalant.

"As luck would have it," Stark answers, "I do." He points down the bar to a woman making exaggerated eyes at him, another blonde.

Steve glances between the blonde and Stark. "You have a type."

"Yup," Stark answers, making a face at the drink he's been given after taking a sip. He definitely isn't old enough to have any idea what he ordered, much less the refined enough palette to appreciate it.

"I guess the only way to talk to you is on the dance floor," Steve says, voice deadpan.

Stark snickers. "You asking me to dance, Cap?"

"Sure am," he answers.

That seems to get some sort of reaction out of Stark other than flippancy. He looks up from his drink, flushing red high on his cheeks. "You're joking."

"No. Dancing seems to be what it takes to get a word with you," counters Steve, nonplussed. He likes that he's found something to throw Stark off his game, just a little. "Unless you prefer to dance in silence, but we both know that isn't true."

Stark turns back to his drink, just for a moment, and downs the rest of it in a way that Steve thinks will surely make him sick later. "You're on. But she still has dibs."

Although he isn't sure if Stark needs to work up his courage or is going to weasel out of this, Steve obliges with a nod. "I'll be waiting."

It’s only after the pair disappear from the bar area that Steve remembers, in a state of blind panic, that he doesn’t actually know how to dance.

Exactly how many answers will he get out of Stark while Steve is stepping on his feet?

As luck would have it, the blonde woman Stark chooses to take to the dance floor before sucking it up and dancing with Captain America seems to be all business once they have a moment relatively alone together. Steve watches from the bar as the pair stop in the middle of the dance floor, jostled by enthusiastic couples trying to keep up with the beat, and she shoves a picture from her handbag under Stark's nose. He snatches it and whatever he sees causes the blood to drain from his face. Within moments, Stark abandons his dance partner and hurries for the nearest exit.

Steve follows. Outside, on the ridiculous red carpet that has been rolled out for the news interviews preceding the event, Stark is declining another round of interviews on his way to a waiting limo and doesn't notice that Steve has followed him all the way to the car until he makes a move to open the door. "It'll never work between us, Cap," Stark snaps. "Take a hint."

"You've been avoiding me all night," Steve accuses, putting a hand on the car door to keep Stark from opening it further. "Why?"

Stark looks up and meets his gaze, holds it for longer than he has all night. "I don't talk to SHIELD agents."

Steve stares. Inside, under the golden glow of the gala's lighting, he didn't notice the small, fresh scar on Stark's cheekbone or the tired bags under his red-rimmed eyes. The longer Steve watches him, the closer to tears Stark seems to be - until he breaks eye contact to shoot a glare toward Steve's hand. "Do you mind? I have places to be."

Without a viable excuse to keep him there, standing between Stark and his car, Steve drops his hand and takes a step back. "I'll be in touch."

Stark snorts. "Good luck with that, Cap."

The car door closes behind Stark; within moments, the limo has pulled away from the curb and Steve has completely failed his first SHIELD mission.

' _Bring it in, Rogers_ ,' a disappointed tone orders across the comm in his ear.

 

\--

 

_This time, Steve thinks vaguely when it all starts to happen again, he knows, this time he'll be ready. For the paralysis, for the fear, for the unknown whispers in the murky depths to which he's lost._

_It won't be the same._

_And it's not._

_It's worse. It's so much worse._

_The cold is sharp, now. Like a knife behind his eyes. He struggles against it, struggles against the weight on his chest to take even the smallest breath and even that's like inhaling shards of ice. There are no whispers on the edge of his awareness, but roaring chasms of deafening silence. There are silent nails on a chalkboard, sending shivers down his spine and making his flesh crawl. The once distant sobs are so close, now, and he knows they can only belong to one person: him._

_There is no fear of the unknown accompanying the strange sense of disconnect from his own body, just a type of agony he can't describe, a nightmare from which he can't seem to wake quickly enough._

_Time dilates and slows, shrinks and speeds up again, until the wordless cacophony inside his own head fades into a dull ringing and the dull ringing, eventually, quiets into only comforting white noise. The distant sound of pleasant conversation, the hum of electricity powering any number of lamps and devices. Soon enough, the beat of his racing heart slows and his ragged breathing evens out, leaving Steve to find himself, embarrassingly, curled up on the tiled floor of the familiar, and vaguely unfamiliar, recovery room at Camp Lehigh._

_As he sits up and looks around, he finds it even stranger than it had been before. The lamp is different, the bed bulkier and with buttons down the side, as if there might be some electronic component to it, somehow. There's a bulky television mounted in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling, and some sort of device by the bedside whose purpose he can't ascertain._

_Slowly, Steve picks himself up from the floor and spends a moment reacquainting himself with his feet. He takes careful steps to the end of the bed and finds his chart hanging there, complete with an unfamiliar doctor's handwriting and signature. In the nearby closet, he finds a change of clothes and happily sheds the thin hospital gown in favor of layers and warmth._

_The hallway beyond the recovery room is empty, apart from the inexcusably bright overhead lights, and tiled over fresh with white and dark blue. Those sounds of pleasant conversation he heard earlier seem to be coming from behind one of the closed doors, but none of the ones Steve passes are labeled as he thinks they should be. He thinks, vaguely, that he'll find someone relevant to Project Rebirth in the cryonics lab._

_Outside the lab, Steve is surprised to find a small boy seated on the floor, looking bored. He glances around the empty hallway, almost convinced he's imagining what he's seeing._

_The boy looks up and smiles. He looks just like Howard did, when Arno first introduced them._

_"Hi?" Steve asks, uncertain._

_"Hi," answers the boy. "Who are you?"_

_"Steve."_

_"Hi, Steve. I'm Anthony."_

_"Hi, Anthony." He pauses, looking up and down the hallway. "Do your parents know you're here?"_

_"Yeah," Anthony answers, though he sounds a little exasperated, as if he's been asked that already. "My dad's doing work in the lab right now."_

_"This lab?" Steve asks, looking at the door to the cryonics lab._

_Anthony nods. "He says he's fixing a freezer, but I can read. That sign says cryonics. That means low-temperature preservation."_

_Steve huffs a soft laugh, pretty surprised by the kid. "You must be pretty smart."_

_"I guess," Anthony says. "My dad doesn't think so, but that's okay. I'm going to show him."_

_Steve smiles a little, glancing toward the lab. If they're working on the chamber, well, he doesn't want to interrupt. "So, you're just waiting for him to come back out?"_

_"No," answers Anthony. "I need tools to finish my robot, but dad says I don't have access to any tools without permission and adult supervision."_

_Robot. Steve finds himself laughing again, bemused. "Well, I'm an adult. Do you want me to help you find some tools?"_

_Anthony looks a little suspicious. "Do you work here? Where's your badge?"_

_Oh. Steve nearly smacks his own forehead. "I ... I don't have a badge," he admits, then motions vaguely to the lab door. "I'm the - that's my freezer they're fixing."_

_Anthony's eyes go big and wide. "Cap!?"_

_Steve rubs at the back of his neck, awkwardly, and smiles wider. "That's me. Hi."_

_"Oh, wow!" Anthony exclaims, jumping to his feet. "Yeah! I mean, yes. Yes, sir. I'd really appreciate some help finding some tools, Cap."_

_"Alright," Steve agrees. "I think I know where a maintenance closet is. Come on."_

_He leads the way back down the hall, away from the cryonics lab, and helps Anthony into the first maintenance closet they find. As it turns out, the kid doesn't need that many tools and none of them should really require supervision for a kid who knows the definition of cryonics, but Anthony insists that Steve accompany him to one of the offices where he's been shunted to work on his robot, out of the way of any adults or important business. Steve doesn't mind in the slightest._

_Settled down on the carpeted office floor, Steve passes Anthony whatever tools he needs, watching the kid tinker as he explains the purpose of his robot prototype and how he hopes his dad will see how smart he is, once it's finished. He designed it himself, Anthony goes on, and Steve feels a little ache in his heart for the kid._

_"I'm sure he will," Steve assures._

_Anthony beams proudly. "Thanks, Cap."_

 

\--

 

Steve Rogers has never really played by the rules. He’s observed the rules, from a distance, and - at least objectively speaking - has been able to admit that rules can be pretty nice, just probably not something for him to follow to the letter always. He has a strong moral compass, an excellent sense of right and wrong, and sometimes it happens that rules are tweaked by outside agendas. He prefers to listen to his instinct, to his _gut_.

His gut tells him to leave his comm device in his hotel room about six hours before he’s due back in New York for a follow-up debriefing to the nasty dressing-down he received from Director Fury over the phone. His instincts lead him all the way to Malibu Point and, alarmingly, right up to the front door of Anthony Stark’s home. Neither tell him what to do when no one answers his knock.

Technically, it’s breaking and entering, but Steve has done a lot worse in his day, with a lot less on the line. He lets himself in through a window, surprised to find that it’s open and that an alarm isn’t tripped as he eases his way inside. The lights are off on the main floor and, from what he can see, the half-level above it, but there’s a muffled racket and sharp white glow pouring up from the stairwell leading to a lower level, so he follows without thinking.

The downstairs is a brightly lit garage and workshop, filled to the brim with music (if it can be called that), heavy on the drums and with a singer who sounds a bit more like he’s dying than providing vocals. Stark is seated on the floor, with bits of scrap metal strewn around him, his shoulders slumped into a heap. When Steve locates the source of the noise and turns off the music, Stark startles to an alert state and snaps his head around to glare at Steve.

“This is why I don’t talk to SHIELD agents!” he declares, getting to his feet and stumbling over the scrap metal on the floor. “You’re trespassing!”

Steve holds up his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not a SHIELD agent.”

Stark narrows his eyes. “You work for SHIELD?”

“ ... technically, yeah.”

“Fury send you?”

“Again, yeah, but - ”

“You’re a SHIELD agent. Get the fuck out of my house.”

Steve sighs. “Look, they don’t know I’m here. I’m not on comms, I’m not - no one followed me. I’m just here to talk, one on one, no ... nothing, no agenda.”

Stark still stares. His eyes are bloodshot, but his heavy voice and stuffed up nose belie tears rather than more alcohol following the gala. His blue jeans are faded, worn threadbare in places, but hang loose on his hips after two months in captivity and not enough time back home spent recovering. The faded MIT shirt he wears hangs on him, highlighting all the pain and anger a well-tailored tuxedo and bravado had hidden just hours ago.

When he doesn’t say anything at first, Steve takes that as tacit acceptance of the terms, tries approaching a discussion like he would approach a wounded animal. “You went to MIT?”

Stark glares. “Yeah. Past tense. I dropped out freshman year.” Steve must look surprised, because Stark laughs. “What, they didn’t give you my file?”

Truth be told, Steve had been distracted looking over the dossier; he saw _Stark, Anthony Edward_ and thought, with a heavy heart, about that curious little boy wandering into the laboratory in search of extra tools to fix his robot. He had blanked on all the rest, for the most part.

“Tell me about it,” Steve urges, rather than answer with as much honesty as he _thinks_.

Stark rolls his eyes. “Six years ago, my old man disappears. Flees the country. Leaves me and mom under a mountain of debt, company on the verge of bankruptcy. I came home, started cranking out tech, anything I could patent or sell or make a buck on. You gotta phone?”

The segue confuses Steve. He blinks, then shakes his head.

“Okay, grandpa,” Stark scoffs, grabbing his one phone off a nearby counter. He flips it open, showing Steve the screen. “Stark Mobile OS. Operating System. I designed it, I’m gonna revolutionize the mobile phone industry. They’ll be miniature computers in a few years, it’ll radically alter social media, mass communication. I got a million ideas, all worth a billion a pop, why stick around MIT and give a shit about my GPA, making the Dean’s List? I’m out here doing. Selling. Fixing Howard’s mistakes, one day at a time.”

It’s a lot to take in, especially since Steve doesn’t understand _much_ about mobile phone technology, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t impressed with the idea of a kid being in a position to _quit college_ at age fifteen to support his mother and keep a billion dollar corporation afloat. It sounds impossible. “And no one knows where Howard is?”

"What's it to you, Cap?" Stark snaps. "You want to give him an earful about your frostbite?"

It might be an issue of national security, but the Stark involvement in Project Rebirth probably isn't a tightly kept family secret, Steve figures.

"Yeah," Steve shoots back, "I was thinking about it."

It isn't the answer the young man is anticipating, Steve can tell by the way he flusters. "Well, get in line," he mumbles, all of his bravado leaking away. He closes his phone and drops it back onto the counter with a sigh.

He looks, Steve thinks, about as tired as Steve feels, even after sixty years of (supposed) sleep. It softens his heart, at least a little. "Anthony," he says, but the way Stark's back goes a little rigid prompts Steve to try again with, "Tony. Look, I'm sorry. About earlier, about all this. Director Fury did send me, but that's not the only reason why I'm here."

"Oh, yeah?" Tony asks, turning his attention back to the heap of scrap on the floor. "Enlighten me."

Steve's jaw tightens, his reflexive response to the disrespect coming off Stark in waves is something that won't help the situation at all. If he snaps, too, then he'll never break through to this kid - and it really is more than just a mission for SHIELD, now.

"I knew your grandfather," Steve admits. "And your dad, though not as well. I - I even know you, a little, but probably don't remember me now. They brought me out of storage to find you when you were taken, but I was a day late and a dollar short. You got yourself out of there while we were en route ... and I know how."

Stark - Tony - slumps his shoulders with a mixture of defeat and relief at that revelation. He settles himself into a nearby desk chair like an old man, like his joints hurt with a strain and weariness he's far too young to comprehend. "Fury can't have it," he says, small and defeated. "Don't - Cap, please, I can do this. I need to do this, to fix this, don't let them take this away from me. Please."

Steve removes the schematics from his jacket pocket, neatly folded over the crumpled creases and tears in the thin paper from when he hastily took it from the cavern workshop. Kneeling in front of Tony's chair, he offers the paper to him like an olive branch. "Fury doesn't know," he promises. "We destroyed everything that was left in that compound. Except this. I've been keeping this safe."

Tony sniffs, trying his best to look unbothered after begging for Steve's cooperation. "That's nice," he says, glancing away without taking the paper, "but you know it's all in my head, right? I just drew that up for - for the guy in there with me."

"I figured you had it memorized," Steve smirks. "But I get points for bringing it back to you and not giving it up to SHIELD, right?"

"As if," answers Tony, though he does finally take the paper from Steve. "They probably copied this. Between these schematics and the wreckage in the desert, pretty soon every SHIELD agent is going to have their own armor. I get it. Cut out the arms dealer, save a fortune."

"The way I hear it, you're not an arms dealer these days, anyway."

Tony frowns and wheels his desk chair back just a little, as if just now realizing Steve is a little further into his persona bubble than he likes. "Then ... good. I'll sleep better at night knowing SHIELD stole my design and I didn't make any more blood money."

Ultimately, Steve can't help but smile. "Tony, SHIELD hasn't stolen your design. They don't care how you got out of that cave, as long as the Soviets don't get hold of the tech. But ... your company designs weapons for the United States government and as soon as you get back home after being held captive behind enemy lines for two months, you announce your company isn't going to be in the arms dealing business anymore. You know how that looks, right?"

"Don't patronize me," Tony asserts, narrowing his eyes at Steve. After a moment spent waiting him out, however, Tony finally admits, "Okay, so I didn't think about how that would look, but I'm not a communist. I just ... it's complicated, okay?"

"I know," Steve agrees, because most things are complicated, especially when it comes to politics and war. "And I want to help, Tony."

Tony, for some reason Steve can't readily discern, laughs. He throws his head back and covers his face with one hand, shaking with laughter. "You're not serious, right?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"It's just - " Tony begins, his laughter trailing off into a sad sigh. "I don't know, it seems unreal that suddenly, out of the blue, Captain America is gonna break into my house and offer to help me solve all my problems."

Steve finds himself smiling softly. "Wanna bet?"

 

\--

 

_"Hey. Obie. Do you know anything about this?"_

_Stane laughs, gruff and insincere, putting his arm around Tony and drawing him in for a photo op with the nearby journalists, just sparing a brief glance for the photo Tony shoves at him. "Only as much as I've had to cover up. What have you been doing, Tony?"_

_"Me?" he demands. "I'm not - "_

_"Double dealing? It looks to me like you are, Tony. And it looked that way to the Board, too. It’s one of the many, many reasons they decided to vote you out."_

_Stane squeezes Tony closer and Tony can't help but feel more than a little threatened by it._

_"I know," he says, the way he gentles his voice hardly covering the menace in his tone, "I know how focused you've been on keeping us out of trouble, fixing Howard's mess, but this isn't the way to do it, son. When you get caught, and you will get caught, you’ll be arrested - tried for treason - and executed for crimes against your country."_

_Stane's calm voice describing the grim reality of his future sends a chill down Tony's spine and he finds himself staring vacantly at the space just behind a photographer's shoulder, half-smile frozen in place._

_"I can fix this, Tony," Stane promises. "But you need to keep your head down and your mouth shut. Or I'm going to have no choice but to report you to the HUAC. I can't let you take us all down with you, son. You understand."_

_Stane laughs again, making a show for the cameras, then gently urges the journalists on their way. He gives Tony's shoulder a painfully tight squeeze, then leaves him standing on the red carpet, shell shocked in his wake._

_Tony has no idea what to do._

 

\--

 

Tony Stark had a poster of Captain America up on his wall when he was a kid; it featured Cap, from the waist up, in a classic 'Uncle Sam' pose, pointing a finger out at the audience with big, vintage typography reading _I WANT YOU_ at the top and _TO BUY U.S. WAR BONDS_ at the bottom. He rarely, if ever, read the bottom line of the poster.

What really gets to him, though, is that Captain America - Steve Rogers - is kind of exactly how he is in Tony's imagination, exactly how he had been in that brief glimpse Tony got as a precocious kid. He's tall and imposing and a little scary, but his smile is kind even if his eyes are tired. His voice is authoritative, but calm, and when he talks, Tony can't help but listen. He's the whole package - with killer blue eyes and a dazzling, private smile that reminds Tony, embarrassingly, how much of his formative years revolved around gazing up at Captain America from his bed.

He might have, as a frustrated twelve year old whose dad hadn't paid a lick of attention to his robots or armor prototypes, thought about talking to Captain America again and feeling reassured that he was on the right track, that he was smart and would make his country proud one day (if not his father). But, in all honesty, even supposing he ever made the leap from weapons consultant back onto the Stark legacy that was Project Rebirth, Tony never thought in a million years he'd really talk to Captain America again, least of all about his problems and insecurities and fears.

And yet here he is, at the breakfast counter of the kitchen in his Malibu home, letting Steve Rogers, official All-American War Hero, cook him breakfast while the sun rises through the tall windows and he explains, in detail, exactly how screwed he currently is.

"The thing is," Tony says, knee nervously jostling, "I don't have the ability to fabricate the parts I need to finish the Mark II armor. Or half the components. The metal, especially. I'd need a fully automated fabrication workshop, a virtually unlimited power supply or completely new wiring with double the draw capacity, if I wanted this done ... like, I don't know, yesterday? That technology is still a few years off and a few billion outside my current price range. Working with what I've got? Two weeks. Maybe longer. And that’s without sleep."

He's rambling. He knows he's rambling. Cap must know he's rambling, too, but he just makes a patient, understanding noise where he stands at the stove, poking at bacon in a frying pan with a dish towel draped over his shoulder. It’s real domestic, actually.

Tony swallows and forces himself to look down at his hands as they drum nervously on the counter. "I'll be in prison by then. For treason."

"I still don't understand that part of the equation," Cap admits.

When Tony glances up to look at him, he finds Steve already looking his way with a soft smile. It’s kind of distracting. Wow.

"Um," Tony starts, willing his voice not to crack under pressure. "I ... I think Obie's double dealing. He has to be. He's the only one. Howard had things signed over to him in the interim, so he had majority control until I turned 21 and since I've stepped up, Cap, I swear to God I'd never - I didn't know until I got over there that the Soviets had my company's weapons."

The crack of an eggshell against the side of a bowl causes him to startle and Tony desperately wishes he could keep his shit together for five minutes around his - isn't he everyone's? - hero. He liked things a lot better a few hours ago when he could find an excuse to hate Cap for working for SHIELD and hate SHIELD for not putting together the code hidden in the information he leaked under torture. Everything was easier when he could just write them all off. But Cap is here to help, because SHIELD thawed him to _find_ Tony, so it seems ridiculous to keep holding onto that grudge when he really, kinda desperately, needs a little backup. He’s in way over his head.

"I believe you," Steve says and he sounds so sincere it hurts. "We didn't see any evidence of Stark Industries weapons or tech during our mop-up."

"I ... destroyed it all," Tony admits, exhaling a relieved sigh to finally get that off his chest. "And I could destroy all the rest, if I could get the suit working."

This time, when Steve glances over at him, his smile is sad. "No you couldn't, Tony. Trust me. Those weapons are probably bolstering the Soviet border patrols in southern Afghanistan. Even if a single, unsanctioned person targeted and destroyed the munitions of those patrol stations, it would be a specific enough incident to be considered open hostility, if not an act of war."

He knows Steve is right. But Steve being right means that his entire plan of action has been faulty since Afghanistan and he could have started World War III just trying to undo the mistakes of yet another entitled, egotistical blowhard in his life.

"That reporter at the gala," Tony says, his voice ringing hollow to his own ears, "she had photos of Stark Industries weapons in enemy hands. If she leaks the story, maybe it could look like an isolated incident, like they raided a convoy over there. But after what Obie said? If that story leaks, then he's gonna pin this all on me, Cap. He'll have contacts, he'll have profit numbers, he'll have accounts and payment records and I don't know how to fight that."

He shouldn't have to know how, Tony thinks bitterly, at least not yet. He's barely old enough to drink and has been struggling to fill the void Howard left since before he needed to shave. He can't sleep at night because of the nightmares and he can't look at himself in the mirror without seeing the huge hole in his chest filled with metal and an old science fair project that’s managing to keep him alive, somehow. His whole life has turned into one, gigantic tailspin and Tony can't, for the life of him, manage to stabilize.

"Hey," Steve says gently, sliding a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of him. "We can fix this, Tony."

Tony takes the fork Steve offers him and only then realizes he's not eaten properly in days, that he's starving and probably not thinking straight because of it. "How're we gonna fix this?" he asks around a mouthful of eggs.

"One step at a time," answers Steve. "But first, I'm going to need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

He thinks about being five years old, thinks about Cap lifting him up to get into the toolbox, himself, rather than handing down the screwdriver to him. He thinks about the poster on his bedroom wall.

"Yeah," answers Tony. "I can do that."

 

\--

 

_It actually isn't that surprising, on the heels of his 'effective immediately' announcement concerning Stark Industries' change in direction, that the Board sends notice they'll be moving to vote on his removal in the coming weeks. He can fight it, he will fight it, but that doesn't mean he isn't scared shitless by the prospect. He can't imagine walking into a room full of stodgy old Board members, some of whom may have been there since before Howard, and making his case successfully._

_But that doesn't mean he's going to roll over and take it._

_"You'll shake this," Obadiah says, just as good-naturedly as ever. He throws an arm around Tony as they stroll through the facility's reactor room. Tony had wanted to see it up close again, now that he’s wearing a matching piece in his chest._

_He laughs. "Doubt it. Better get a good severance package."_

_"You'll still own majority share," Obie reasons. "You'll still be a good place, financially. You and Maria. You just won't chair the board, won't make the big decisions."_

_"I thought I was shaking this?" Tony ribs. He already knows Obie's right. This is all going south, all because of his good intentions, and pretty soon his company, his father's and grandfather's company, will be back to flooding the market with weapons, fueling the fight on both sides. He's not going to stop the bloodshed, not this way._

_"Tony, Tony, Tony," answers Obie, hugging him closer. "Either way, you've had a good run. You did the impossible, son. You brought us out of financial ruin, got us back into the black, and we've had record profits in the last few years, all thanks to your inventions and innovations. You can't fault the Board not wanting to see the company on the verge of bankruptcy again so soon, can you?"_

_It's a fair point, he really can't. Still, he laughs a little, bitterly._

_"You can go back to college,” Obie goes on. “Get a real diploma. Make your mother proud walking across that stage. When you get back, there'll be a place waiting for you here. Maybe not on the Board, but you know we won't be able to hold down half of those SHIELD contracts without your genius, kid."_

_Tony pulls away a little, hating the sound of that. "I'm serious about the weapons, Obie," he says. "I'm tired of being a merchant of death, I'm tired of making money like that. Don't you think this cold war has gone on long enough? Don't you think enough people have died, enough people have been hurt?"_

_Obadiah levels with him a serious look at that question, before his gaze flits down to Tony's chest. "Let me see it," Obie demands, but his tone is gentle and encouraging, fatherly._  

 _"See what? Who told you?" Tony counters, realizing a moment too late that he, just now, confirmed Obie's suspicions, if no one had previously told him. He really has to watch what he says._  

 _"Tony," Obie says again. "Show me."_  

_With a sigh, Tony unbuttons his shirt to reveal the miniaturized arc reactor embedded in his chest. The flesh around the circle of light is a mass of red, angry scars and the tech inside, around the glow, isn't the best. He still doesn't have the resources to upgrade, not yet._

_Obadiah stares for a moment, then looks around to see if anyone else in the reactor room has seen. "Okay," he agrees, reaching out to do up Tony's buttons for him. "Let's keep that between us, huh? We don't want anyone on the Board using that against you, too. They'll say you're medically incompetent."_

_Will they? Tony looks down as Obie pats his chest, feeling the uncomfortable press of the weight of Obie's hand on the hollow feeling behind the metal. He hasn't thought about how much of his sternum still exists, but the morbid thought springs to mind suddenly. How uncomfortably close to his heart is this mess?_

_"Okay," Tony agrees. "Just us."_

 

\--

 

As it turns out, trusting Steve also means trusting SHIELD, but Tony was raised trusting SHIELD and had only recently fallen into the habit of doing otherwise. It also means completing the debriefing he'd been putting off, admitting to the (very minor) information he'd leaked under duress, and - most annoyingly of all - showing off his brand new chest accessory.

"It's a miniaturized version of the reactor that powers our California office," Tony explains, jerking his t-shirt back down and fidgeting with the hem until he feels comfortable again. "It's powering an electromagnet that's keeping the shrapnel out of my heart. Kind of an upgrade, considering the magnet used to be powered by an old car battery."

"I see," Fury says. He holds his hands on the table between them and levels Tony with a very disconcerting stare. "Is there anything else, Mr. Stark?"

Tony takes a breath and glances sidelong at Steve, knowing he’ll get a reassuring nod. He isn’t disappointed. “Okay,” he says, looking back at Fury. “I also designed and built a fully weaponized suit of armor, powered by the arc reactor, with flight capability. It’s how I escaped.”

Fury looks inscrutable.

"But," Tony adds, "I think you guys knew that already."

Fury leans forward just enough to make him, somehow, even more menacing. "Our concern now, Mr. Stark, is the fact that we did not have the opportunity to recover the wreckage of your suit before our team was extracted from hostile territory. What is the likelihood of your suit being recovered by Soviet forces, reconstructed, and reverse engineered?"

Although he understands that, as with everything the United States has done since the end of the war, this is as valid a concern as anything else, Tony can't help but feel a little offended. "Okay, first of all, don't let my honorary degree fool you," he asserts. "I am, literally, a certified genius and that suit represents years of design and planning."

"It's my understanding that you built that thing in a cave with scrap parts," Fury counters dryly. "Forgive me for not sharing your vision."

Okay, he deserves that. The prototype had definitely been a hot mess. (Literally, he needs to remember to put in some sort of cooling system in the Mark II.)

"All I'm saying, Director, is that if they did happen to recover the pieces and they did happen to put them together, it would still take them years to figure out - and they would be missing a key component to powering the whole system." Here, Tony taps the circle of light embedded in his chest. "Proprietary Stark technology. They'll never do clean energy like this."

Fury smirks. "That one looks like it's made out of scrap parts, too."

"Well," Tony says, suddenly paying more attention to tapping his fingers on the edge of the table, " - it is. But I'm waiting on another supply of palladium to finish my Mark II reactor. This one could hardly power the armor I built over there, much less the upgraded systems I'm planning for - "

 _Own it_ , he tells himself. That really just has to be his mantra, now. He talks too damn much and hasn't quite built the reserve of bravado needed to power him through more than a familiar social situation. 

" - for the Mark II armor," Tony finishes, looking up at Fury and doing his best not to look caught out. 

Somehow, he'd gotten all the way here, into this meeting, without addressing whether or not Steve was going to tell Fury about his attempts to build another suit and go gallivanting off into one of the more hotly debated US/Soviet border conflicts to shake things up and destroy Stark Industries weapons that had been illegally sold to the enemy. Tony just sort of assumed that if he kept his mouth shut, none of this would come to light and he could still work on his armor, for whatever purposes he ultimately wants it for. 

Fury leans back in his chair and tilts his chin up, regarding Tony with a suspicious look. It isn't the first time that Tony has wondered if he should look at the eye or the patch, but that's kind of a horrible thing to think, much less ask. Right? 

"Let's make sure you get that supply of palladium," Fury says, in a surprising twist that has Tony snapping his head up so fast he thinks he's given himself whiplash. "If you're not interested in building weapons for us anymore, Mr. Stark, I have some other defense contracts I'd like you to take a look at - and I don't want you to keel over between now and then." 

Defense contracts, Tony knows, usually have more to do with offensive means than anything, but he's quite willing to give Director Fury the benefit of the doubt here and assume they're not going to twist his arm into exactly the kind of work he doesn't want to do anymore. It's something about the way Fury pitches it, casually, that makes it seem reassuringly like he'll be working on reinforcing support structures or building a better fallout bunker. Which, (okay boring but), he could do. In his sleep. Easily. And it might save lives, instead of sacrificing them needlessly.

"And the armor?" Tony asks, feeling like he might have missed a subtle clue, somewhere, about Fury's feelings on the matter. 

"We're tabling that discussion for now," Fury says. "You seem to be having some difficulty sourcing materials and funding this pet project. Let's give you some time to get all your paperwork in order, all your patents, and we'll discuss what applications this has later. For now, I'd like to focus on getting you back to work."

"That's great," Tony agrees, because it's a lot easier a solution than he thought he'd get after his post-Afghanistan announcements and being turned on by his own Board of Directors, "but Stane seems pretty focused on throwing me under the bus, here, so what are we doing about that?" 

Fury does something with his lips, with his smile, that Tony is sure he's only ever seen happen with big cats on National Geographic - and it's kind of terrifying. 

"You," Fury points at Tony, "are going back home to fix that mess in your chest. That is priority one. Do not misunderstand me when I say it looks awful. I really wish you hadn't shown me that shit, kid." 

Really, if Tony thought it was an option not to show him, he probably wouldn't have. It is pretty gross. "And Stane?" 

Fury jerks his thumb over to indicate Steve, "This one here's going to dig up the real dirt on Stane. If he's trying to sell you as a communist spy, rest assured I'm not buying it."

Tony deflates back into his chair with a relieved sigh. “You have no idea how great it is to hear you say that.” 

“I can imagine,” Fury deadpans.

 

\--

 

_"Be careful, kid," Obie says over the phone, their satellite connection absolutely deplorable. How does the military operate with such shoddy phone service?_

_Tony rolls his eyes. "I'm just installing equipment. I'm not even pitching anything new. There's not a single set of brass within a hundred miles of this installation, Obie, trust me. I can't screw this up, there will be no PR nightmare or backlash, I'm just a guy installing some new gear for some tired grunts on the border."_  

 _For some reason, since he stepped up at CEO, Obadiah has been hard after him to put away the bulk of his SHIELD contracting work and focus on other things. But Tony is a born multitasker and working for SHIELD on the side is ... kind of a patriotic duty, as well as a family obligation. He doesn't get too sentimental about family obligations until it comes to maybe one day taking up his family's mantle on Project Rebirth._  

_"You want to run through the process with me?" Obie asks, gently encouraging. As if Tony could forget._

_Tony sighs. "I disconnect the main power. Sentry tower goes dark. Back-up generator reengages after a five second window. I install the new processor, hook up the new dish, reroute the main power, then take the back-up generator offline to reboot the main. I'm done in twenty, tops."_

_Obadiah is quiet for several seconds and Tony begins to wonder if they disconnected. "Obie?"_

_"Sounds like you got it," his voice crackles over the line, laughing. "Getting started now?"_

_"Five minutes," Tony promises. "Gotta go, now. Take care, tell mom I said I'll be back in time for dinner tomorrow."_

_Obadiah laughs. "I will. Goodbye, Tony."_  

 _Funny enough, funny how it works, but five seconds after the main power goes down, all hell broke loose instead of the back-up generator switching on._  

_But by then, Tony's been thrown back by an explosion and is far too busy staring, dumbfounded, at the blood soaking through the front of his shirt to think about things like cause and effect._

_Or betrayal._

 

\--

 

When Tony said he was waiting on a supply of palladium to complete his Mark II arc reactor, what he meant to say was that ... he, actually, needed to remember to _order_ a supply of it, because he hadn't yet, and it's not exactly something he can go down to the corner market to procure. It's just, well, between his oldest family friend turning threatening and the Board voting him out, he just sort of kept putting off rebuilding the component that's been keeping him alive for several months now. It just happens when you have a lot on your plate, he supposes.

Still, there might not be anything quite so embarrassing as being dropped off back home with a little black box, complete with raised SHIELD logo on the top, brimming with several thousand dollars worth of the transition metal in question. He feels like the uncool kid whose mom packed his lunch with a sappy little note the first day of school. Hell, who is he kidding? He was definitely always that kid. (And he definitely needs to call his mom when this all blows over.)

Downstairs, the workshop goes into full tilt: Tony puts on loud music to either help him focus or keep his mind from wandering to Captain America's current mission, then fires up his smelting equipment to get to work. He doesn't have an assistant this time, just a robot he's sort of stupidly fond of, but the tools and the working conditions are far better. He counts the hours by the CD changes, by how far into his music collection he gets before he starts to think fondly of having several cups of coffee, and only starts to feel like he's really getting into his stride once his eyes begin to burn with exhaustion.

At some point after he exhausts all the hair metal bands in his music collection, Tony gets the ridiculous idea to use the scraps he'd been half-heartedly fitting together when Captain America broke in and use them in the construction of a gauntlet. "Miniaturized repulsor tech," he tells Dum-E conversationally, while his third pot of coffee is brewing. "What do you think?"

Dum-E hums in a way that sort of sounds empathetic.

"It'll be great, shut up," Tony counters.

The robot answers by wagging its arm at him and Tony leaves off the palm-sized components to drink directly from the coffee pot carafe. "Let's watch some old cartoons. Wanna watch some old cartoons? I think I've got Road Runner."

Dum-E hums again and wheels his way over to the DVD player to make a new, unique mess while Tony sets up his welding station and kills the music. Somehow, Dum-E wrangles _Blade Runner_ into the DVD player and Tony just doesn't argue. It's kind of a better choice.

Once all the reactor components are welded together, he fits in the piece holding the palladium and twists where necessary until the whole thing locks into place and shimmers a bright, vibrant blue. "Well, that's done," Tony announces happily, carefully twisting the components back apart and setting them aside, not entirely feeling the idea of fiddling with his current reactor, the electromagnet, and the possibility of killing himself while at home with just his robots and old sci-fi movies.

Instead, he turns his attention to working steadily on the gauntlet; for now, he'll use an external power supply to hook it directly into the Mark II arc reactor, but it can eventually be fitted into the Mark II armor. The miniaturized repulsor tech will need extensive field testing, but Tony is confident that they can double as weapons and flight stabilizers.

By the time he's gotten far enough along to actually fit his hand into the gauntlet and has started to think about yet another pot of coffee, there's an entirely different movie playing and Dum-E has littered the floor across the workshop with DVDs and their cases. Tony isn't exactly sure how many of those have cycled through the player while he wasn't paying attention.

"You're a mess," he sighs, smiling down at his work. He removes the gauntlet and places it back on the welding stand, making a few notes about the adjustments he needs to make. "Clean this up, I'm going to get a sandwich."

He takes the stairs two at a time, but doesn't get very many steps across the dimly lit living room before his phone rings.

"Yeah?" Tony answers, but never hears a voice on the other end of the line. Instead, briefly, his ears are filled with a sharp ringing that seems to seize his muscle control in a sudden, debilitating fashion. Arms catch him before he can collapse into a heap and he's thrown unceremoniously onto the sofa, only to find Obadiah smiling down at him from above.

Obadiah holds his finger to his lips, as if to shush Tony, then takes Tony's phone and slowly flips the screen closed to end the call. He spends another moment removing a set of earplugs, which finally triggers Tony's memory about the technology that was rejected from one of their more recent government contracts. No one wanted a debilitating sound, he remembers, but they could come back when the sound could kill.

"You remember this one, don't you?" Obadiah asks, holding up the device that emitted the sound. "Shame it never realized its full potential. But, still, I think there are lots of applications for a weapon that causes temporary paralysis."

Tony takes short, labored breaths, trying to fight the feeling, trying to move just a little, but he can't. Obadiah settles onto the sofa next to him, stretching one arm around the back to cradle Tony's head.

"You know, I never dreamed, when I pushed your father into bankrupting his company so I could drive him out, that you would make it so easy to rebuild," Obadiah says conversationally. "I thought it would take me twice as long. Thank God you gave up your whole life to come back and help speed up my timetable."

Tony can only stare vaguely, with just the ceiling in his field of vision, and listen to Obadiah's deep, resonant voice, familiar and calm and so sickeningly sinister. It churns Tony's stomach, it makes his skin crawl, but he can't move away.

"I was really sorry to put that hit out on you," he goes on, not sounding apologetic in the least. "I was really going to miss your genius, Tony, but I really couldn't have you taking over, getting in the way, _meddling_. Howard was a good puppet, until he got too nosy for his own damn good, and I knew you'd never let me play you like I did him. You're too smart, aren't you?"

Stane's arm tightens around his shoulders and he chuckles. "But you came back and made things _even worse_ , didn't you? Canceling our weapons contracts, asking nosy little questions about my overseas deals. The only thing that kept you alive this long, Tony, was the bits and pieces of that suit the Soviets found in the desert. They brought it to me to put back together ... but, and I was real sorry to tell them, I hadn't the faintest idea how it worked." He pauses, leaning in to whisper against Tony's ear, "So, they let me keep it. And, Tony, I know how it works now."

The weight of Obadiah's hand presses down on the hollowness behind the arc reactor one, twice, three times. Tony can tell that he's tapping the front of the piece through the fabric of his shirt. "This is the power source," he murmurs.  "This is all I need. You don't mind if I break your heart, do you?"

With a sudden shift, Obadiah is on his feet and looming into Tony's field of vision. He drags the front of Tony's shirt up without breaking eye contact. Tony can't see what he does, can't feel in that mass of scar tissue and emptiness, but soon enough there's a twisting jerk and everything stops. Obadiah smiles, then lifts the arc reactor in the palm of his hand for Tony to see. "There," he says softly. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

Obadiah stands, chuckling to himself. "Sorry it had to end like this, kid," he waxes on, still sounding none too apologetic. "For what's it worth, you were better than your old man, but ... well, I'm better than you both. You know how it goes."

He walks out of Tony's limited field of vision and, distantly, Tony hears the front door open and slam closed.

 

\--

 

_"Now isn't a good time, Tony."_

_He stands in the doorway of Howard's home office, watching him hastily shove files and folders into his briefcase. It's the first time he's been home in months and Tony wonders if Howard is even aware he's due to leave for college soon._

_"I was just wondering if you were heading to Camp Lehigh," he says, trying to keep it brief. It's easier that way, easier for them both. "I saw it on your schedule."_

_Howard makes a frustrated noise. "No. I'm canceling this year's trip."_

_Tony hesitates, something angry churning in his stomach, and steps further into Howard's office. "He's due for maintenance. It's been years."_

_"Tony, please," Howard counters, talking down to him like he's still a child. "It's a cryonic chamber, not one of your robots, and it's fine. Our last serious hardware upgrade was a complete success. It shouldn't need maintenance for another five, maybe ten years."_

_He clenches his fists at his side. "I'm not talking about the chamber, Dad, I'm talking about the man inside it. Captain America."_

_Howard stops stuffing his briefcase and levels Tony with a serious look. "Aren't you a little old for hero worship, Anthony? I thought we talked about growing up, about taking that damned poster off your wall."_

_The reference to the conversation sends a chill down his spine and Tony feels his nails bite into the meat of his palms, he's clenching his fists so tightly. As he recalls, Howard's biggest objection to his fifteen year old son still having up a poster of Captain America on his bedroom wall is that it's a little too ... effeminate._

_"I saw your schematics," Tony blurts, too hot under the collar to think about the fight he's getting himself into. "For the chamber. For the subliminal stimuli. You've spent the last twenty years driving him crazy, Howard. You know that, right? It's some ridiculous goddamn 70's pseudoscience you cooked up to impress your dad and all it's doing is keeping a part of his brain conscious while the rest of him is suspended."_

_Howard stares at him. His lip curls. "What did you say?"_

_"I asked you how much the Commies paid for you to drive America's greatest war hero insane!" Tony counters hotly._

_He never saw it coming, Howard's reaction. The back of Howard's closed fist catches him on the jaw and Tony stumbles back into the frame of the door, shocked._

_"Out!" Howard shouts._

_There's a part of Tony, a really stupid, defiant part that wants to stay, wants to argue, wants to make his father see that it's all wrong and it needs to be fixed. But when he hesitates, Howard takes a menacing step forward. "Now!"_

_Tony leaves - and makes it a point not to run into Howard again before he leaves for college._

 

\--

 

With very little prying into Obadiah Stane's computer in the Stark Industries office, they discover several things that, at the very least, incriminate him in Stark's kidnapping and attempted ransom. There's also a very interesting file, from a very small basement laboratory of the on-site R&D team, detailing the reconstruction of a suit of armor that Hawkeye says is very similar, if not identical, to Stark's flying trashcan.

"Well," Steve says. "I guess we don't have to worry about it falling into Soviet hands."

"We'll just go and pick that up," Agent Coulson says, "after we arrest Stane."

The suit that SHIELD gives him for the mission isn't like his original, Steve notices, but it isn't regular Army fatigues in drab desert camo, either, so he can't complain. Instead, the suit is dark blue, with silver stripes at the shoulders and a star in the middle of his chest, cowl optional. And, when he gets his shield from weapons storage, it’s restored to its vintage glory.

"It looks like a target," Hawkeye teases as he loads arrow shafts into the quiver.

Steve rolls his eyes. "It's vibranium. They're supposed to hit it."

Hawkeye grins and Steve finds himself doing the same, which is much better than cutting the pre-mission tension with a knife. He tries not to think about how nice it is to have something like a friend again - or how worried he is to think of another person like that, after everything else.

They unload with a small entourage of field agents, along with Agent Coulson, and Steve takes point, Hawkeye falling to the rear to cover them. The R&D building is dark and locked down, but a few well-placed C4 charges give them full access. "Fan out," Coulson orders. "Find Stane, find the armor."

They find both, almost instantly, as a huge, hulking suit of armor comes bellowing out of the depths of a laboratory, deflecting a hail of gunfire from the team and crashing into several field agents. Steve reacts, flinging his shield at the armor's faceplate and diving between its stubby legs. From behind him, Hawkeye looses a barrage of flashbang arrows, causing a blinding confusion that rattles Steve more than he'd like to admit.

He's on his feet behind the armor, which can't maneuver its bulk in the confined space of the lab, and Steve notices exposed wires at the base of its neck. Climbing up, he grabs his shield from where it embedded itself in the wall above the armor and uses the edge to slice at the wiring. The whole suit judders, then flings itself forward, careening through walls on a blind run. Hawkeye barely escapes its path of destruction and Steve gives chase immediately, following its path until he finds himself outside, watching the rampaging swathe of destruction Stane is cutting through the R&D parking lot.

"Did you do that on purpose?" Hawkeye wonders breathlessly as he picks his way out of the building's ruined front.

"Flank him," Steve orders. Hawkeye answers with a snappy, sarcastic salute, then heads off to circle around one side.

As Steve heads in the opposite direction, the squeal of tires in the parking lot catches his attention. Something red and shiny, some model far too modern for Steve to recognize, burns rubber from the entrance of the parking lot on a collision course with Stane's suit. Just before impact, the door flies open and its occupant tucks and rolls out, barely missing the sickening crunch of metal on metal. The suit topples, but doesn't stay down for long, struggling to its hands and knees, then regaining its feet.

Steve weaves his way between cars, still trying to take position on the opposite flank, and watches with a mix of surprise and horror as Tony picks himself up off the ground, battered and scraped from the asphalt, and raises his right arm, encased in bright silver metal.

"Sorry it has to end like this, Stane," Tony says, as a high-pitched whine fills the air.

" _STARK_ ," the suit bellows.

Tony's lips twitch into a smile. "You know how it goes," he says.

The electronic whine stops and the gauntlet encasing Tony's arm kicks back with the force of the white light that bursts from its palm. The shot hits Stane's suit dead in the center of its chest, shattering the glass housing the blue glow there. Steve barely makes it to Tony in time to pull him down and cover him with his shield as the resulting explosion and shock wave rock through the parking lot.

When it's over, Steve straightens and helps Tony regain his feet, looking around at the smoldering wreckage of Stane's suit in the middle of a seat of damaged cars and honking car alarms.

"You okay?" Steve asks.

Tony looks shocked, then confused. "I ... I can't believe I did that," he admits, as the reality of it sinks in for him.

"You did what you had to," assures Steve.

Tony looks up at him, the confusion and shock settling into a resigned expression. "You really think so, Cap?"

Steve swallows. He's never been one to use that excuse in the face of killing a person, but ... he's also never faced a man rampaging around in an out of control, weaponized suit of armor, either. "Yeah, Tony," he answers. "I really do."

 

\--

 

There's a cover story in place for what happened that night at Stark Industries and another one, entirely, for what happened to Obadiah Stane. The media devours it eagerly, just as it does many things, and is soon enough back to reporting celebrity gossip, of which Steve Rogers is chagrined to realize he is a part. After a few weeks, everything has supposedly returned to normal.

Almost everything.

"You sure about this, Steve?" Tony asks, his voice is soft, almost intimate as he leans over Steve, eyes flitting back and forth as he tries to read Steve's expression. Their lips are close enough that he can feel Tony's breath, ragged and nervous.

"Yeah," Steve answers. "I trust you."

Tony closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath, then draws back from leaning into the cryonic chamber. He's checked and rechecked everything a thousand times, but his nerves are still shot.

"I've been waiting for this day," admits Tony, resting his hand on the outside of the chamber, close to where Steve's hand is resting on the inside. "Ever since I saw Howard's schematics. I've rewritten everything in my head a thousand times, trying to get it right. Trying to fix it."

Steve glances over, smiling apologetically when he sees tears in Tony's eyes. "I've been waiting sixty years to get a little rest. Something tells me this time it'll work."

Tony glances away, then back, nodding tightly. "Well, it's no Camp Lehigh," he says, motioning around at the Stark Industries laboratory. "It's, uh, actually ... way better. You'll have staff, constant monitoring. I'll, uh, be here, too. This subliminal stimuli idea of Howard's wasn't all terrible, just - poorly executed. Tweaked a little, it'll be therapeutic. Just what you need."

After a deep, even breath, Steve tilts his head back against the padding of the chamber and closes his eyes. "Think it'll be like falling asleep this time?"

"Yeah," Tony says, his voice tight with emotion and punctuated by the hiss of the chamber lid sliding into place. "Just like."

Actually, it kind of exactly is.

 

 

 


	2. Epilogue

Warm sunlight streams through the window by his bedside, waking him gently over the course of several long, luxurious minutes. It's bright and pleasant; for the first time in what feels like an age, Steve wakes with a smile on his face.

"Hi."

The soft greeting draws Steve's attention away from watching a bird flit past the window. He turns his head and finds Tony sitting by his bedside. He's older, with faint laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and roguish facial hair. It suits him. And so does the smile he wears when he sees the recognition in Steve's expression.

"Hi," Steve answers softly.

Tony's hand settles onto the back of his where it rests on the bed, light but intimate. "How are you feeling?"

Steve takes in a steadying breath, exhaling it slowly. "Good," he answers with a quiet, elated huff of laughter. "Rested."

 

\--

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author's Note** : _About the Alternate History._ One aspect of the prompt which inspired this fic involved creating an older, embittered Captain America after a longer WWII. In order to achieve this, I did quite a bit of historical deviation beginning with writing Operation Overlord as a strategic failure. Ostensibly, this tipped the balance of power in favor of the Soviets and they did eventually, in this universe, clash with the Allies after the defeat of the Nazi forces. The war ended with the signing of a peace treaty between Soviet Russia and the Allied Nations in 1952, but created a world in which Cold War fears and McCarthyism are still very real. 
> 
> _About the Universe & Timeline_. This universe is a mash-up of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (for Steve's backstory, as well as additional characters, SHIELD, and the Iron Man elements) and Marvel Adventures: Iron Man (for Tony's backstory). Please note, for anyone's curiosity and sanity (namely my own), most of this story takes place in the early 2000s. Tony's age has also been lowered relative to everyone else's, mostly due to the addition of his Marvel Adventures grandfather, Arno Stark.
> 
> **Warnings** : This story contains references to both canon-typical violence (superheroes!) and war-typical violence, including character death, torture, and the traumatic fallout (PTSD) of these experiences. Additionally, there are references to psychological trauma in a science fiction context (don't mess with cryonics, kids) and one scene of parental violence against a teenager (with no implied history of child abuse, just a heated outburst). There is also a small, blink-and-you-miss-it reference that may (and possibly should) be read as homophobia. Most, if not all, interaction between Tony and Obadiah will read as some form of emotional manipulation, gaslighting, etc, because Tony is young and (so Obadiah thinks) easily manipulated in this story universe.


End file.
